It’s also still very funny in that self-aware ‘90s way as Stiles and Ledger prove to be less oil and water than peanut butter and jelly. He does this because he thinks Kat is the unpopular alt-girl who has no time for guys… that is until shy Cameron (babyfaced Joseph Gordon-Levitt) convinces Ledger’s rebel without a cause to pick Kat up for money.īy adapting the Bard, 10 Things highlights the bones of the modern rom-com with their often overly complicated plots that end in laughs and kisses. Yet there’s something truthful about the film’s scenery-chewing Larry Miller (Walter Stratford), an overly protective father who will not allow his youngest daughter Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) to date until her older sister Kat (Stiles), who is a senior at their high school, also does. That Elizabethan romantic comedy, which is in turn set in Renaissance Italy, doesn’t necessarily have the most up to date gender dynamics. That, too, feels like a cheeky nod to the movie’s source material, William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

Seriously, their school learning is inexplicably in a castle on a hill! But there are few movies as purely beguiling as the moment where a young Heath Ledger picks up a microphone and starts belting out the Four Seasons to Julia Stiles on the football field behind their absurdly picturesque high school. Jumping on the then-delightfully ‘90s bandwagon of remaking classic novels and plays with today’s loquacious teenagers, 10 Things I Hate About You might not be the most original movie on this list (which is perhaps why it was unfairly dismissed by older middle-aged critics at the time). This is why a few movies like Moulin Rouge! and A Knight’s Tale are not on the list. Additionally, modernizations need to be set in a close to modern world, with the period being either during or near the filmmakers’ lifetimes as opposed to creating an anachronism set in the past. *Editor’s Note: We are using “literature” as a catch-all term, which means plays will be included. Thus we have put our heads together to list out in alphabetical order the best movie modernizations of classic literature. But completely re-contextualizing it for a modern setting and making it land? That’s something else altogether marvelous.

Hence adapting a classic work for a modern audience, whether on film, television, or TikTok, is admirable. But the experience of living, of loving, of losing (to name just a few such topics)? Those will remain as universal as the human experience is long. The times we live in will change, culture will change, and even our values change. Generally speaking, the classics that tend to be celebrated one generation after another, and especially those that are passed down from one century to another, are works that speak of something timeless. But is it just the length of time a text or work survives that qualifies it as a “classic” or is there something more? What makes a story a “classic?” It’s a vague yet glorious distinction applied to books, films, art, and even models of vintage cars whose value is passed down from one generation to the next.

Watch hamlet full movie 1996